Can It (Please) Happen Here?

Talk about incredible federal cash infusions. The history of Federal One, the theatrical arm of the W.P.A., and its head, Hallie Flanagan, as chronicled by Susan Quinn in the fascinating book “Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times” (Walker ), makes a cutting-edge season at BAM look like a night at the opera in Dubuque, for a fraction of the cost. The far-reaching experiment lasted only from 1935 to 1939, when the fledgling House Un-American Activities Committee pulled the plug after hearings that questioned, among other things, the identity of Christopher Marlowe and whether he was a Communist. But, while it lasted, it produced the most radically engaged public-theatre works America has ever seen.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that the pool of out-of-work actors Flanagan had to draw on consisted of legions of down-and-outers with unique skills, such as aging vaudevillians and an errant African dance troupe; or that the youthful directors John Houseman and Orson Welles got in on the act, with, most famously, “The Cradle Will Rock”; or that the playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and John Galsworthy offered up their plays practically gratis; or that the President’s wife, Eleanor, consistently went to bat for the team when the going got rough. Certainly the zeitgeist played a part in the program’s daring string of innovations and successes, from the anti-Fascist “It Can’t Happen Here”—which opened simultaneously on twenty-one stages in twenty-one versions around the country, “reflecting local sensibilities and capabilities”—to racially integrated projects and audiences, Negro units, Meyerholdian Living Newspapers, and Spanish- and Yiddish-language productions. There was even a rabble-rousing, roller-skating rodent extravaganza, “The Revolt of the Beavers,” so thrilling that it incited children to rush the stage.

In light of our current recessionary woes, Quinn’s book reminds us that, while it may be possible to stimulate feckless financiers with piles of cash, composting collective innovation from scraps of unused talent can be done for bubkes.

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